Bash Brace Expansion

Bash brace expansion is useful in a lot of different situations. One of them is to do surgery on text and make more shorter and elegant command lines.

Moving (renaming) files

$ mv -v foo-{bar,tux}.txt
renamed 'foo-bar.txt' -> 'foo-tux.txt'

$ mv -v {foo-,}tux.txt
renamed 'foo-tux.txt' -> 'tux.txt'

$ mv -v {,jedi-}tux.txt
renamed 'tux.txt' -> 'jedi-tux.txt'

Listing Files

$ \ls -1i {/usr,}/bin/{test,[}
2634460 '/bin/['
2634545 /bin/test
2634460 '/usr/bin/['
2634545 /usr/bin/test